I’m all about building communities, authenticity and transparency, but why are we always putting social media efforts and SEO appart? Why do people say: “I don’t care about SEO, I prefer to spend time building a community”? Both can go together.

I would never advise someone to write an article solely for search engines, but why not think about the fact that Google, Yahoo and Bing will index your content? I mean, your content is going to get indexed anyway, so having search engines in mind when you write content isn’t a bad thing for extra visibility. Having search engines in mind doesn’t mean writing keywords stuffed articles, it just means paying extra attention to basic SEO.

Then you know what? You can still build that community and benefit from some search engine traffic.

SEO

SEO is usually the biggest concern when changing a domain name because most people think this will lead to losing all their backlinks. While it is not the best decision ever SEOwise, there is some techniques you can use to make sure you don’t lose your existing PR and backlinks. Fortunately for us, Google published some guidelines for moving a website:

• Test the move process by moving the contents of one directory or subdomain first. Then use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect those pages on your old site to your new site. This tells Google and other search engines that your site has permanently moved.

• Once this is complete, check to see that the pages on your new site are appearing in Google’s search results. When you’re satisfied that the move is working correctly, you can move your entire site. Don’t do a blanket redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it’s not a good user experience. A page-to-page redirect (where each page on the old site gets redirected to the corresponding page on the new site) is more work, but gives your users a consistent and transparent experience. If there won’t be a 1:1 match between pages on your old and new site, try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content.

• If you’re changing your domain because of site rebranding or redesign, you might want to think about doing this in two phases: first, move your site; and second, launch your redesign. This manages the amount of change your users see at any stage in the process, and can make the process seem smoother. Keeping the variables to a minimum also makes it easier to troubleshoot unexpected behavior.

• Check both external and internal links to pages on your site. Ideally, you should contact the webmaster of each site that links to yours and ask them to update the links to point to the page on your new domain. If this isn’t practical, make sure that all pages with incoming links are redirected to your new site. You should also check internal links within your old site, and update them to point to your new domain. Once your content is in place on your new server, use a link checker like Xenu to make sure you don’t have broken legacy links on your site. This is especially important if your original content included absolute links (like www.example.com/cooking/recipes/chocolatecake.html) instead of relative links (like …/recipes/chocolatecake.html).

• To prevent confusion, it’s best to make sure you retain control of your old site domain for at least 180 days.

• Add your new site to your Webmaster Tools account, and verify your ownership of it. Then create and submit a Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site. This tells Google that your content is now available on your new site, and that we should go and crawl it.

• Finally, keep both your new and old site verified in Webmaster Tools, and review crawl errors regularly to make sure that the 301s from the old site are working properly, and that the new site isn’t showing unwanted 404 errors.

From my personal experience, within a month or two, you should recover your PR and the Google Index should be updated. So yes, expect some bad days especially within the first 2 weeks. Redirecting all your content to your new website using a 301 redirect is really the key, as it will tell Google the page has permanently moved and the new page should be considered as the original source from now on.

A nice side effect of using anchor text in the ranking algorithm Google uses is that you will continue to rank for your old name on Google. Even if the name is completely different, the links with your old website name now points to your new website because of the 301 redirect which mean you will most likely rank for that your old keywords.

A negative side effect that I can see from a SEO point of view is if you were targeting a specific geographic location with a particular TLD (.co.uk for example) and switched to a .com. If you don’t have enough backlinks from the country you are targetting and now don’t have a proper TLD for that country, you might disappear from the results for this country. So, be careful if you target a specific market or region.

Another negative impact that can happen is if you redirect your old domain to a subfolder of the new domain. Let’s say you are redirecting your established pizza.com domain to xyz.com/services/pizza. This might not help your rankings but honestly, it has nothing with moving the website, it’s a pure SEO issue: root domains tend to rank better than subfolders.

Backlinks

This is related to SEO, but backlinks are probably the biggest SEO concern for most people, so let’s make a new section for that. It is important to note that when using a permanent 301 redirect, all backlinks will now link to your new domain. If you look at Yahoo Site Explorer and  don’t see your old backlinks, it is absolutely normal, they will never appear for your new domain. They still exist, but Yahoo Site explorer doesn’t update with 301 redirects: it’s a bit dumb and only look for backlinks linking directly to your domain name. So, don’t panic, they’re still there and still giving you PageRank juice. Maybe not for the right keywords anymore though…

Branding and RSS Subscribers

To me, the biggest issue has always been branding and RSS Subscribers. I feel I’ve always made the right decision, but changing a brand’s name is never a good idea. People know you under a certain name and all of a sudden you’re someone else. Imagine if Wal-Mart decided to change their name, this would certainly impact their brand. Well, this is no different for a website, even if it’s on a much smaller scale. But you know, as long as changing  your name is a long term decision, it’s a good decision.

Another important aspect to consider is if the site you are moving is a blog and you have to change the RSS Feed address. If you can keep the same address do it as it will avoid you a lot of pain. Services like FeedBurner usually offer a 30 days redirect to the new feed address, but you will lose some subscribers in the process as not all of them will take the time to update their feed reader. You can also see it as a way to keep only your interested readers.

Conclusion

As you see, moving a site to another domain isn’t as bad as it seems from a SEO point of view, but could hurt your brand. I’m sure you can find quite a lot of horror stories out there and I can imagine it can be quite a nightmare when moving a website with a million of pages indexed (delicious for example), but for most people I feel it’s not that bad.

I want to talk about the worst mistake you can make when it comes to SEO and Google traffic: assuming Google is dumb. There are some very common mistakes I see on a all sort of websites, including “professional business” websites and these mistakes are mostly due to thinking Google is dumb and can’t detect basic patterns like keyword stuffing. Thinking you are smarter than Google will probably hurt your website more than help it.

Common mistakes

Writing with the search engines in mind at first is a bad idea. The best technique in my opinion is to write in a natural way AND THEN optimize what you wrote for search engines if you have to. Here are some common patterns I often see that won’t help your rankings:

• Overusing the target keywords (too much repetition)
• Overusing bold text
• Keywords stuffing
• Text with same color as background to hide keywords
• Not using h1, h2, hx tags
• Gazillion HTML errors (Not XHTML compliant)
• Page title too long with 100 keywords

Assuming Google is dumb

Why most of these mistakes also mean assuming Google is dumb? Well, let’s take “overusing the target keywords” for example: some people think that by making the target keywords appear on the page very often, it will improve their website’s ranking. While not entirely false, it is not entirely true. It is true that you have to make your keywords standout, but don’t assume Google can’t detect non-natural text. The Google algorithm is not as simple as “This keyword represent 25% of the total text, let’s rank the site higher for this keyword”. Look, there are thousands of engineers and PhDs behind the Google algorithm, I’m sure they thought of that.

It’s the same story for keyword stuffing. Don’t you think Google can’t detect simple keywords repetition patterns like “Internet Marketing, Marketing, Internet, Search Engine Optimisation, …, …” all cleanly separated by a comma? Please.

The same goes with using a hundred keywords in your website’s title and H tags. By doing that, you dilute the keywords and simply make it harder for Google to determine what your website is about. It’s not because “Web 2.0″ is one of the 50 keywords in your title that you will rank for “Web 2.0″, you have to prove to Google it’s a relevant keyword.

This goes on and on. My advice is: if you think you found a new “clever” way to rank higher and that it is kind of obvious, probably someone at Google thought about it too.

My top SEO basic tips

Here are my key advices for good website ranking:

• XHTML compliant website (hard with blogs), use http://validator.w3.org/ to validate
• Using H1, H2, H3 tags (only one H1 tag per page)
• Natural writing, still with an emphasis on your keywords
• Make your text and titles relevant
• Get decent “dofollow” backlinks
• Relevant anchor text for backlinks

There are a lot more of course, but if you do this, you’re good to go. And you know what? SEO is all about common sense, it’s when you try to be clever that you will most likely fail.

Share with us

Have you made some of these mistakes in the past and what are your top tips for a good ranking? Share with us your knowledge and what you think!

Direct Traffic

I love direct traffic because it makes me feel good! Direct traffic is someone who actually remembered your domain name and took the time to type it manually in the address bar to visit your site. If you reach my website on a consistent basis by typing the name manually in your browser, I love you.  Direct traffic is about 30% of my blog traffic which I think is huge! Let’s have a look if you guys are good traffic

If it’s green, it’s good. For people not familiar with Google Analytics, everything that’s green or red is the particular statistic compared to the site’s average. There’s no surprise here as direct traffic actually represents people willing to spend time on the site. The only bad statistics is the number of new visitors but I don’t see this as bad: you guys are coming back, that’s good!

Referring Traffic

Referring traffic doesn’t seem to be that good. Referring traffic is basically traffic coming from social networks or other blogs and a lot of that is because of comments I write on so many blogs. So, let’s have a look at how you guys can’t provide me with good traffic! Just kidding.

OK, so that sucks. I mean, the only good news is that it’s bringing me new visitors but I already knew that! When I look at the stats, these are pretty good stats to me but it’s below the website’s average! It doesn’t mean you guys should stop sending me love…!

Google Traffic

Now let’s have a look if the Google traffic loves me!

I am so impressed! The Google traffic ain’t that good on some other website I run so it really is a surprise to see how good in this niche the search traffic seems to be. Every visitor spent almost ten minutes of their precious time on my blog, visiting an average of 4 pages!

Build your personal brand

You see that referring traffic is good but not as good as direct traffic and Google traffic. What does that mean? Well, it means that we all have to continue building our brand. I don’t care if people subscribe to my feed, I much prefer to see them type my name directly in the address bar or in Google: it means people actually care! That direct traffic converts in word of mouth, because these visitors know who you are and can remember your website’s name.

As for the Google traffic I don’t know. It looks to be the killer, but it might go down in the future when the site gets a lot more traffic. I prefer to think people like what they read and decide to stick around.

Now it’s not because referring traffic isn’t the best traffic source that we have to stop commenting on blogs! You know why? Yes, that personal brand thing and the loop starts all over again. In the end, traffic is simple: it all comes down to establishing your brand out there.

What’s in SEOQuake?

What’s better than an example? I took a screen shot of the toolbar while visiting ShoeMoney and broke it down in different parts (Shoe is my website of choice when it comes to examples I know…).

For statistics lover like me, we get this part of the toolbar:

From left to right we have

• PR: PageRank
• I: Number of indexed pages in Google
• L: Number of links pointing to that that SINGLE page
• LD: Link Domain, which is the total number of backlinks for the domain
• I: Number of pages indexed in MSN
• Rank: Alexa Rank

In a fraction of seconds, you can see if the website you visit is a serious website. I particularly like the Alexa Rank and the number of backlinks. These are usually good indicators of a website popularity. I know I wrote about the Alexa ranking and how it is inaccurate sometimes, but it’s still a good metric.

Then, we have some other interesting options:

From left to right we have:

• Age: domain age (which ShoeMoney blocks so that’s why we don’t see it.)
• I: The Delicious Index or the number of times the page was bookmarked on delicious.
• whois: The domain’s whois information.

The domain age is provided by The web archive and the button will bring you to the domain’s history.

Finally, some very useful options for your own website:

Source will of course bring you the source code of the page and it is very useful to access the page’s source code faster. Then we have Internal links and External links: Internal links is the number of links on the current page linking to the same domain and External links is the number of links on the current page linking to an external domain. This can be quite useful when you want to control your precious link juice! Finally, a feature I really enjoy to do keyword optimization is the density feature. This feature will give you a lot of information about the keywords on the page:

This way, you can optimize your keywords by checking how many time each of them appears on the page. The keyword density tool can go to 4 keywords phrases, which is really cool because we don’t necessarily always target individual keywords.

Get SEO-Quake

So that’s it, I use this toolbar all the time and check it for every site I visit. It’s a little addictive to be honest and I feel like I’m missing something when I’m on a computer that doen’t have the toolbar. It’s free so there really is no reasons not to try it Get it here.